Evenin' Squier

I headed down to Kosmic Sound's BUTT sale on the weekend. I was supposed to be going to take a look at electronic drumkits: we have kind of semi-destroyed our Guitar Hero drumkit. I had a good look at Roland's VDrum TD series, and the Yamaha DTXPlorers, and was very impressed but I didn't buy anything. Kosmic normally sells these at a decent discount anyway and being a solid seller there were no 'special prices' happening for the BUTT sale.

I did however happen to notice a rack of Telecasters as I was walking out. In particular I noticed a very cheap Squier Affinity Telecaster which I felt compelled to question the helpful sales staff about, and also to strum gently to determine it's musical qualities versus its (low low) price. One thing lead to another and with a last minute 'crazy deal' done on the already ludicrous price, I ended up buying it.

And I am really glad I did - I was impressed instore with the range of sounds I could get out of the pickups and tone controls, and with the general quality of the fretboard. It turns out that several reviews agree, and my advice is that if you are looking for a hella cheap Tele for general mucking around (I have always wanted one, so this was the perfect excuse), you can't go past this bad boy.

I got so excited by how nice it felt to play, I did this quick and dirty demo of Pink Floyd's Shine On You Crazy Diamond, using a backing track I found (also awesome, although tricky to time the first solo to match the chord changes). I mainly use the neck pickup for solo 1 and the bridge pickup for solo2, so you really don't get a taste of what the middle pickup selector position sounds like, but hopefully you get the idea. I just used the simple but effective Pedal/Amp simulator in Garageband to get these sounds, rather than wake the house up with the loud (but better sounding) tube amp option.

Apologies to anyone who either doesn't care about guitars, or doesn't care about Pink Floyd.